Iran Announces 6-Day Lockdown Amid Rise in COVID Cases | Coronavirus pandemic News

[ad_1]

Tehran, Iran As Iranians are angry and frustrated with the country’s response to COVID-19, the government has announced a six-day nationwide shutdown to curb an alarming rise in deaths and infections.

The national anti-coronavirus task force, led by President Ebrahim Raisi, said on Saturday that the nationwide shutdown would start on Monday and last until Saturday. All offices, banks and non-essential businesses will be closed.

A ban on travel within the city will also be introduced from Sunday morning until Saturday evening.

It was then that earlier this month, Health Minister Saeed Namaki called for an urgent two-week lockdown imposed by the military to prevent a complete collapse of the country’s strained health system.

Several previous closures have been easily flouted amid lax enforcement by authorities.

It remains to be seen whether this new effort will have a significant effect in tackling the Middle East’s deadliest pandemic, now in its fifth wave defined by the Delta variant.

The health ministry said on Saturday that 466 more Iranians had died from COVID-19 and that 29,700 more cases had been discovered in the past 24 hours. The official death toll since February 2020 stands at over 97,000, but officials said the actual number was likely much higher.

Tehran had its deadliest day on Friday, with the deaths of 390 people, including 216 from COVID-19. This figure broke a grim record in the 51-year history of Behesht-e Zahra, the capital’s cemetery, which is the largest in Iran.

The latest color-coded map showing the severity of outbreaks shows zero cities ranked blue, indicating the lowest alarm level. This is when 358 counties, encompassing almost all of the country’s 31 provinces, are classified in red.

The start of the Islamic holy month of Muharram ceremonies from Tuesday across the country raised concerns that the death toll could climb even higher.

Numerous videos released earlier this week in several provinces showed people mourning in tight spaces, many without masks.

This prompted authorities to change Muharram’s health protocols, no longer allowing events to be held in indoor spaces, and also banning group ceremonies taking to the streets.

Videos of full hospitals with patients lying on the floor or in courtyards and queues at pharmacies that sometimes face shortages of life-saving drugs, have become commonplace.

Slow vaccination and public anger

Even though the deployment of the Iranian vaccine has accelerated in recent weeks, the country is still far from having vaccinated most of its 83 million inhabitants.

Only 14.7 million people received at least one dose, while less than four million received both full doses.

Vaccination centers regularly see long queues that sometimes stretch for miles, with wait times taking hours.

Vaccines have so far been imported from China, Russia, India, Cuba, Japan and the global COVAX initiative, but officials have engaged in a blame game over why more doses were not purchased, which only fueled public anger.

President Raisi said on Saturday that imports of 30 million doses have been finalized, without specifying their origins, and that an additional 60 million doses are needed to control the pandemic.

More than a million doses of COVIran Barekat, the first locally developed vaccine in the country, have been administered, but large-scale production has been delayed several times and officials have not explained why.

Some Iranians have taken to social media in recent days to try to draw attention to their plight, using the hashtag #SoSIran and tagging the World Health Organization.

Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei in January banned imports of vaccines made by the United States and the United Kingdom, saying he did not trust them because they might want to test their products on others.

Khamenei said on Wednesday that the pandemic was now the country’s number one priority and that efforts needed to be redoubled so that vaccines could be delivered to the population by any means necessary.

While it’s unlikely to be a step back on his original ban, the remark appears to be an effort to find a loophole. A health official said earlier this week that Pfizer and other US and UK-made vaccines could be imported if produced in other countries.

Meanwhile, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander-in-Chief Hossein Salami officially congratulated outgoing Health Minister Namaki and Alireza Zali, the head of Tehran’s anti-coronavirus task force on Thursday.

If it had not been for some of our efforts, today we would witness the daily deaths of more than 1,300 people, said the minister, who said earlier this month that the world was in awe of how Iran has handled the pandemic.

[ad_2]